Increasing use of wireless telephones and personal computers has led to a corresponding increase in demand for advanced telecommunication services that were once thought practical only for specialized applications. In the 1980s, wireless voice communication became widely available through cellular telephone networks. Such services were thought at first to be the exclusive province of the businessman because of expected high subscriber costs. The same was also true for access to remotely distributed computer networks, whereby until very recently, only business people and large institutions could afford the necessary computers and wireline access equipment.
As a result of the widespread availability of affordable new technologies, the general population now increasingly desires to have not only wireline access to networks such as the Internet and private intranets, but also wireless access as well. Wireless technology is particularly useful to users of portable computers, laptop computers, hand-held personal digital assistants and the like who prefer access to such networks without being tethered to a telephone line.
There still is no widely available satisfactory solution for providing low cost, high speed access to the Internet, private intranets, and other networks using the existing wireless infrastructure. This is most likely an artifact of several unfortunate circumstances. For one, the typical manner of providing high speed data service in the business environment over a wireline network is not readily adaptable to the voice grade service available in most homes or offices. Such standard high speed data services also do not lend themselves well to efficient transmission over standard cellular wireless handsets because wireless networks were originally designed only to provide voice services. As a result, present day digital wireless communication systems are optimized for voice transmissions, although certain schemes such as CDMA do provide some measure of asymmetrical behavior for the accommodation of data transmission. For example, the data rate specified by the Telecommunication Industry Association (TIA) for IS-95 on the forward traffic channel is adjustable in increments from 1.2 kbps up to 9.6 kbps for so-called Rate Set 1, and increments from 1.8 kbps up to 14.4 kbps for Rate Set 2. On the reverse link traffic channel, however, the data rate is fixed at 4.8 kbps.
Existing wireless systems therefore typically provide a radio channel that can accommodate maximum data rates only in the range of 14.4 kilobits per second (kbps) at best in the forward direction. Such a low data rate channel does not lend itself directly to transmitting data at rates of 28.8 or even 56.6 kbps that are now commonly available using inexpensive wireline modems, not to mention even higher rates such as the 128 kbps that are available with Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) type equipment. Data rates at these levels are rapidly becoming the minimum acceptable rates for activities such as browsing web pages.
Although wireline networks were known at the time when cellular systems were initially developed, for the most part, there was no provision made for such wireless systems to provide higher speed ISDN- or xDSL-grade data services over cellular network topologies.
In most wireless systems, there are many more potential users than radio channel resources. Some type of demand based multiple access is therefore required.
Whether the multiple access is provided by the traditional Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) using analog modulation on a group of radio frequency carrier signals, or by schemes that permit sharing of a radio carrier frequency using Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), or Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), the nature of the radio spectrum is such that it is a medium that is expected to be shared. This is quite dissimilar to the traditional environment for data transmission, in which the wireline medium is relatively inexpensive to obtain and is not typically intended to be shared.
Other factors to consider in the design of a wireless system are the characteristics of the data itself. For example, consider that access to web pages in general is burst-oriented, with asymmetrical data rate transmission requirements in a reverse and forward direction. Typically, the user of a remote client computer first specifies the address of a web page to a browser program. The browser program then sends this web page address data, which is usually 100 bytes or less in length, over the network to a server computer. The server computer then responds with the content of the requested web page, which may include anywhere from 10 kilobytes to several megabytes of text, image, audio, or even video data. The user thereafter may spend several seconds or even several minutes reading the content of the page before downloading another web page.
In an office environment, the nature of most employees' computer work habits is typically to check a few web pages and then to do something else for an extended period of time, such as accessing locally stored data or even terminating use of the computer altogether. Therefore, even though such users may remain connected to the Internet or private intranet continuously during an entire day, actual use of the high speed data link usually quite sporadic.
If wireless data transfer services supporting Internet connectivity are to coexist with wireless voice communication, it is becoming increasingly important to optimize the use of available resources in wireless CDMA systems. Frequency re-use and dynamic traffic channel allocation address some aspects of increasing the efficiency of high performance wireless CDMA communication systems, but there is still a need for more efficient utilization of available resources.